Special Agent: My Life on the Front Lines as a Woman in the FBI

By Candice DeLong

Candice DeLong has been called a real-life Clarice Starling and a female Donnie Brasco. She has been on the front lines of some of the FBIs most gripping and memorable cases, including being chosen as one of the three agents to carry out the manhunt for the Unabomber in Lincoln, Montana. She has tailed terrorists, gone undercover as a gangster's moll, and posed as the madam for a call-girl ring. Now, in this updated edition of her bestselling book, she reveals the dangers and rewards of being a woman on the front lines of the world's most powerful law enforcement agency. She traces the unusual career path that led her to crime fighting and recounts the incredible obstacles she faced as a woman and as a fledgling agent. She takes readers step by step through the profiling process and shows how she helped solve a number of incredible cases. The story of her role as a lead investigator on the notorious Tylenol Murderer case is particularly compelling. Finally, she gives the true, insider's story behind the investigation that led to the arrest of the Unabomber, including information that the media can't or won't reveal. A remarkable portrait of courage and grace under fire, Special Agent offers a missing chapter to the annals of law enforcement and a dramatic and often funny portrait of an extraordinary woman who has dedicated her heart and soul to the crusade against crime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667849713

Book preview

PREFACE

In the twenty-two years since the first publication of this book, some things have changed.

The single most important contributing factor in my intellectual evolution during this time is the knowledge garnered from the thirty-six people convicted of murder I interviewed. I learned a lot. No amount of time sitting in a classroom, such as in the Behavioral Assessment Unit at Quantico, can compare to sitting across a table—face to face—from someone who has taken another human being’s life.

For twenty years in law enforcement I lived true crime every day. Since I retired from the FBI my life has been a classroom of sorts: learning from the kind of people I used to arrest, as well as their victims—if they survived.

People ask me, Candice, why am I so fascinated by true crime? And Do you think that’s a bit weird, being drawn to the macabre? My answer is simple: You are interested because crimes of interpersonal violence are so unusual, and it’s a learning experience for the curious. There is much to be gleaned from these stories to keep you and your loved ones safe.

For me, the most important question is why? Why would someone willingly hurt or kill another person? The answer to that question is one we are unlikely to hear in a courtroom from the killer, but one we might learn from doing a deep dive into their background, their behavior, and their psyche. Knowledge truly is power, and I would not be doing what I do if it were not educational.

If people watch my shows and listen to my podcast, they will learn such things as how to recognize early warning signs of danger, red flags of who not to trust, and most importantly, how to spot the deadly type. There’s nothing macabre or weird about learning something that will keep you safe.

Most Americans, thankfully, will never encounter a horribly violent person. They are very unlikely to ever meet a detective or an FBI agent. But it’s only human nature to be curious about the unusual behaviors of others and arm yourself with knowledge.

I’ve been a student of true crime for forty-two years now, and I am still learning.

-Candice DeLong

April, 2022

PROLOGUE

The call came at four o’clock in the morning. It was Tom, my squadmate on the San Francisco Child Abduction Task Force, who had a hot tip from the Nevada FBI. Candice, he told me, a guy’s passing through town with a kidnapped boy. Wanna get in on the bust?

Hell, yes, I said, instantly awake. It’s rare to get a chance to thwart a kidnapping in progress and to recover the victim alive. In more than 90 percent of non-custody-related abductions, the child is molested and then quickly released. But each year, of the two hundred to three hundred children who go missing for more than twenty-four hours, fewer than 50 percent ever make it home.

This child, Joshua,* was the eleven-year-old son of a single mother, who had let her friend Michael treat him to a week at the beach. Having raised my own son alone, I can certainly understand how welcome such an offer might sound. But it’s not at all uncommon for pedophiles to befriend or even marry women just to get at their children. There’s actually a special law enforcement term for it—the stepdaddy syndrome. Others may enter an adult relationship as a cover for their true predilections. The notorious John Wayne Gacy, for example, a divorced father of two, married his second wife the same year he embarked on a rampage of abduction and torture that would claim the lives of thirty-three teenage boys. He buried most of them in the crawl space beneath the house where he lived with his wife, her children, and his mother-in-law, who would often complain of the odor of dead rats.

Frighteningly, a full quarter of the annual tally of sex-related murders have victims under the age of seventeen. Indeed, according to the Department of Justice, children under seventeen suffer a shocking proportion—78 percent—of the sexual assaults resulting in imprisonment. Over 85 percent of their abusers are people they know and trust—people like Michael, a family friend for several years, who had kidnapped Joshua.

On the day he was to come home, Joshua called his mother to ask permission to stay longer. She said no—and then her son disappeared. The local FBI office managed to determine that the abductor had bought two bus tickets to Oakland, California, across the Bay Bridge from me. I went to meet Tom and the rest of the team at the Oakland Greyhound station.

No luck yet, I was told. It was possible that we had missed the abductor and child, for at least one bus had already come in that night. At 9 a.m., Ray Cummings,* supervisor of the Oakland violent crime squad, suggested that we split up and also stake out the Amtrak station, in case they tried to catch the early-morning train. Its destination was San Diego, just ten miles from Mexico. Once they made it across the border, they would probably be lost to us forever.

The train left at 9:30, so we sped right over. Ray’s direction proved right, for there on the platform, ready to board, was a man with a young boy who matched the description of the missing child. As soon as we approached, the guy tried to bolt, with the boy tight in his clutches. A chorus of shouts rang out: Hold it right there! FBI!

As the team grabbed him and tried to wrestle him into handcuffs, I reached through the jostling arms and pried the boy from his grasp. You’re okay, honey, I said soothingly. He was crying and shaking with terror.

Then, all of a sudden, the suspect pitched forward, gasping and gagging, and collapsed, croaking out, I’m having a heart attack.

I’ll just bet you are, I thought.

Leaving Joshua in the care of one of my squadmates, I pushed through the crowd that had started to ring the suspect. Don’t worry, I said, dropping down beside him. I’m a nurse.

I checked his pupils and his breathing and slid my fingers to his throat to find his pulse. Like a mother examining a child for signs of fever, I laid my palms on his forehead and his cheeks. My suspicion was correct. He’s faking, I told the squad hovering over us.

They yanked him to his feet and cuffed his hands behind him. Sobbing out loud now, Joshua screamed, Leave him alone! He’s my friend!

That didn’t surprise me. The reaction was classic—the outrage of a child seduced by the promise of love. Unlike psychopaths, who get sexual or sadistic or vengeful thrills from their power over the weak, pedophiles have erotic feelings for children and try to woo them with gifts and affection. The lonely child of a mother run ragged by trying to care for her family and to make ends meet may be all too vulnerable to the lavish attentions of another adult. Then, when the adult who has so insidiously won his love awakens his sexuality, the child will be torn apart by confusion and guilt. The psychic damage pedophiles do children, with their seductions and betrayals, is profound.

Over the next eight hours, I would learn the harrowing details of Joshua’s ongoing abuse and recent vacation. At first he kept fidgeting and stonewalling me, reluctant to betray his friend. Finally he admitted, Michael said I should never tell the cops about anything. He said you would hurt us and take me away.

You know, I have a son named Seth who looks just like you, I told him. Do I seem like someone who would hurt you?"

He acknowledged that I didn’t.

Besides, I went on, nobody’s going to hurt you because you’ve done nothing wrong. Adults who like children in the wrong way will say things like that to fool them.

I kept using the words children and child to emphasize to Joshua that whatever had gone on, he wasn’t responsible, even if—being eleven and so immature that he looked like nine—he wanted to think he was a man. He had suffered enough emotional torment to overwhelm a grown man. I wanted to give him permission to feel victimized.

But Joshua insisted Michael was his friend and wanted to show me his gifts to prove it. When he unzipped his duffel bag, I saw a crack pipe sticking out of a tangle of clothes. What’s that thing? I asked.

He pulled it out and then let a little of the story leak. Fed only cookies and soda pop by his kidnapper—and plied with crack cocaine, presumably to numb him into submission—in a single week he had dropped from eighty to a haggard seventy pounds. Still, Joshua thought that getting to smoke crack was cool. And look what he bought me, Agent Candy, he said, digging out some CDs. He loves me more than my mother—and I hate her.

This kind of brainwashing is typical too. Pedophiles try to boost their odds of success and reduce their risk of exposure by alienating their young victims from their families.

That’s what bad adults do, I told him, They buy presents—they’ll try anything to get what they want. The tell lies and make promises to make children think they love them. But your mother is the one who loves you more than anything. She’s the one who called so we would rescue you. That’s how much your mother loves you.

I reiterated, And no matter what a bad adult might say, nothing bad that happens is ever the child’s fault. The adult is the one—the only one— who is wrong.

Clearly, love had little to do with the abductor’s plans. He had told Joshua that they were headed for Mexico, where he would buy a little girl and take the two of them to the Netherlands. They would make a video to send Joshua’s mother, explaining that he was never coming back. That the Netherlands figured in the scheme suggested that they’d be making other videos too, for shooting child pornography films there is relatively easy. After that, I had no doubt, two children would be useless, disposable baggage to a man on the run.

I also felt certain that Joshua had been sexually abused. We had discovered that his abductor was wanted in Texas for parole violations following two prior child-molestation convictions. It appalled me that such scum had been allowed to ooze back onto the streets. Yet abusers all too commonly are. Child molesters rarely do serious time, even though they murder children’s innocence.

But it is very hard for any eleven-year-old boy to talk about sex, never mind one who has been abused by a man. I tried to give Joshua neutral language to express what had been done to him. Were you ever touched in the ‘bathing suit area’? I asked. That’s what some adults will do to children.

Little by little I chipped away at his resistance. When Joshua finally opened up, it was like a boil had been lanced, and what came out made me want to cry. In a rush, he described the acts he had been forced to perform, some of which Michael had captured on video. A search of Michael’s duffel bag would turn up these homemade sex tapes. For over a year, Michael had been, in Joshua’s words, violating him, just as he had done with his older brother in the past.

I kept reaffirming that the abuse wasn’t his fault, that any wrongdoing was Michael’s. He’s the one who could go to jail, not you, I stressed.

The idea of Michael behind bars seemed to comfort Joshua immensely. I still remember how his shoulders relaxed, as if he were shedding a burden, and how his face softened. I was watching a brittle young man ease up and become a sweet little boy again—the child he deserved to be. He clung to me for solace, and I just held him and let him cry. He then fell fast asleep, sitting in a chair.

Joshua was still too upset to talk to his mother, who was irate when she reached me at home that night. Look, I had to say, do you know that your boyfriend beats your sons with a belt? And that your great pal Michael has sexually abused both of them? He’s been doing it to Joshua for over a year.

What? she said, incredulous.

That’s right, your older son too. He’s going to need some therapy.

At that she broke down in tears.

Give Joshua some time, I told her more gently. For now, let’s just be thankful that he’s alive.

I could well imagine the anguish and terrible guilt she had to be feeling. Fortunately, it took only a few days for Joshua to come around, and then he grew very anxious to see her. That made me feel good—and so did the compliment that Ray Cummings was kind enough to pay me: I’ve never seen anyone turn a kid around that fast.

I couldn’t take all the credit, however. I had been applying some of the principles I’d learned from Ken Lanning at the FBI Academy, one of the world’s leading authorities on child victimization.

If Joshua’s turnaround seemed fast, our case against Michael unfolded in slow motion. Though we had caught him dead to rights, he feigned mental illness and was held in a psychiatric facility for evaluation—a rather common dodge among sex offenders. John Wayne Gacy tried to claim that he wasn’t responsible for his crimes because he had multiple personality disorder. As John Douglas, one of the FBI’s legendary profilers, jokes in his book Mindhunter, I’ll let the innocent personalities go as long as I can lock up the guilty one.

Finally, Michael was found mentally fit and, two years after his arrest, pled guilty in court. I sat next to Joshua that day, and he could now say of his former friend: I hate him, Agent Candy. He would be sentenced— thanks to sex videos of Joshua, the cocaine found in Joshua’s bloodstream, and other violations tacked on to the abduction charges—to thirty years in prison. The prosecutor told me that it was the heaviest sentence he’d ever seen imposed on a child abductor whose victim was alive. Imagine how a jury would have walloped him!

Michael will be eligible for parole after twenty-five years. Since he was forty-three at the time of his arrest, he will then be sixty-eight years old. If you think that age will render him less of a threat, think again. While the average age at arrest of all violent offenders, according to government statistics, is twenty-nine, sex offenders skew older. About 7 percent of rapists and 12 percent of those convicted of sexual assault (a broader category encompassing sex acts, such as sodomy, apart from frank intercourse) are over fifty. I know of one man—99 percent of all sex crimes are committed by men—who was convicted of sexual assault when he was a hundred years old.

Joshua’s story doesn’t have a happy ending—at least not yet. Sexual abuse victims require intensive psychotherapy, which the federal government will underwrite for as long as they need it. But many continue to suffer such backlash effects as extreme aggression or a lifelong sense of stigmatization. The victims’ families are traumatized as well, especially when the offender is a close relative, as is the case roughly 45 percent of the time when the victim is under the age of eleven. Some victims must be treated for diseases they contract as a result of the abuse, including AIDS. Tragically, unless they get help, about a third will perpetuate the cycle of violation by becoming child molesters themselves.

In my twenty years in the FBI, I’ve had the chance to bear witness to history. I came in on one of the early waves of women storming what had been an unassailable male bastion for more than fifty years. Back then women represented less than 4 percent of a total agent force of eight thousand. Today we’re still a minority but a much more significant one—15 percent of the total 11,500 agent—1,700 strong.

But women were just one of the great sea changes transforming the bureau at the time I entered. It was the dawn of the art/science of profiling, the most systematic analysis of crimes and their perpetrators ever attempted in history. I was lucky enough to train under the masters at the Bureau’s celebrated Behavioral Science Unit and could now and then dream that I was helping to advance the field—as when John Douglas, the father of the discipline, praised one of my profiles as making his job easier and when the great Roy Hazelwood, the preeminent authority on all aspects of sexual criminality, from rape, sadism, and murder to autoerotic asphyxiation, pronounced a peculiar case of mine one for the books. That made me feel proud—like I was making a contribution.

I have helped snare serial rapists and killer, bird-dogged dangerous terrorists, and stood on the front lines as the infamous Unabomber was brought to justice—wearing my son Seth’s jacket! I had been tracking the Unabomber for months, and on that day, I left a message on Seth’s machine saying, It’s over now, breaking into tears of relief. When I heard he’d saved that tape, and when I saw the walls of his apartment papered with new stories on our mission—and in each, our captive, Ted Kaczynski, had the ski parka I’d borrowed from Seth draped over his shoulders—I cried again.

But the single most gratifying achievement of my entire career was rescuing Joshua and returning him to his mother’s arms. He asked me to bring him home; so I was there at the airport when she reached out to him in remorse, sorrow, sympathy, reassurance—and above all, joy—and he stepped into the protection and comfort of her embrace. They had a long road ahead to repair their shattered lives, but they were ready now to take the first step.

The controversial cases—the Wacos, the Ruby Ridges—are the ones that make the news, but in that moment I thought, This is what I wish the public could see. This is why I joined the bureau. This is what we do: protect and serve.

For ultimately, it’s not the high-profile or even the high-adrenaline cases that have made my life in the FBI so satisfying. It’s been just as much the day-to-day feeling that I am part of a safety net—as if the bureau were a big shark fence protecting the world from the dangers and predators of the deep.

1

DARK EYES

I was working as a nurse when I first got the notion of joining the FBI. Not your average bedside/medical surgical nurse but head nurse in a maximum-security psychiatric unit at University Hospital* in Chicago. So I had to laugh when one of my instructors at Quantico, seeing me avert my eyes at the skull-sawing-open point of an autopsy movie, declared that I’d make a poor FBI agent. It was a pretty natural human reflex to look away, but to him it meant that I couldn’t handle stress (code for being squeamish, like a girl).

I could have told him plenty about stress. I almost said, You’re an idiot, but luckily I didn’t. As it was he wrote me up for being insolent, just for laughing.

On a maximum-security psych ward, you live under constant stress, with your antennae always up, ready to fly into action at the sound of a thump, a shout, or the drumming of running footsteps. When you have violent patients, you must be hyper-attuned, ever watchful as their moods escalate, day by day, waiting for the inevitable explosion to come. I did a stretch like that for five years once, without a break, though today many hospitals require psych ward personnel to rotate off such units periodically for the sake of their own sanity. But back then, psychiatric nursing was what I believed I was born to do.

When I was young a close friend of mine suffered from a crippling depression, and I saw how devastating the demons of the mind can be. My idealism was ignited, and I resolved that when I got older I would help those living under the scourge of mental illness—in what capacity, I wasn’t sure. Like most girls of the immediate postwar generation, I assumed that my options were limited.

My mother, Geraldine, worked in a bank until she met my father, Ken Rosing, a building contractor. He had first spotted her by the pool table at the Hasty Pudding Club, when he was a Harvard student and she was a USO volunteer. After a whirlwind two-month courtship they wed and, at the time of my father’s death, had been devoted to each other for fifty-five years. They raised four children on a three-acre spread near Phoenix. I grew up on the back of a horse. Then, when I was fourteen, my family moved to San Francisco, trading the wide-open spaces for the confines of an apartment in Pacific Heights. But I loved the city, and being the only girl, I was lucky enough to get my own room. They boys had to share.

My oldest brother, Wayne, was an amateur astronomer and had a home telescope lab, where he taught me to grind mirrors. He would go on to become a computer engineer, helping to usher Apple into its boom years. But he continued to build telescopes, and now—professionally, as an avocation—he creates high-powered devices and installs them all over the world.

My brother Keith, two years younger than Wayne, introduced me to the Visible Man and Visible Woman, clear plastic models of the human body filled with brightly colored organs. We had a game, competing to see who could name all the different parts of anatomical systems the fastest— respiratory, digestive, endocrine, the bones of the skeleton. Keith would go on to become a doctor, one of the first physicians to be board-certified in emergency medicine. Somewhere in our DNA there must be a gene promoting the love of risk and crisis.

I am two years younger than Keith, and two years after me, Glenn came along. He is the computer systems specialist for the Milwaukee FBI. He has been tremendously supportive, frequently calling during my training at Quantico to give me encouragement and to tell me how proud of me he was. We always shared as kids, and now as adults both working for the FBI, we have even more to talk about.

Compared to my brothers, I was an underachiever, a later bloomer. I enrolled in a three-year nursing program right out of high school, then got married when I was nineteen. Six years later, my only son, Seth, was born. I had met my husband, then living in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, when he was spending a summer visiting his family in California. He was standing at a gas pump, filling his car, when I tried to roll, literally, into the station. My car had run out of gas—on an incline luckily, so I could push it myself most of the way—and had lurched to a halt on the street right by the station. I told him my predicament, asking him to help me roll it the rest of the way to the pumps. He let out a beautiful laugh—he had such a fine alto tenor voice that he had trained to sing opera—and I fell in love.

Moving to Champaign-Urbana with my new groom, I enrolled at the university to get a bachelor of science degree in nursing. Out of curiosity I took a criminology course, not realizing that its highlights would include regular presentations of slides featuring violent deaths. Half the campus, it seemed, would turn out for these freak shows, to shiver and laugh at the grisly images. That made me sick. There was one terrible picture that I can still see in my mind—the headless torso of a coed, dressed in a plaid skirt, sweater set, and saddle shoes. The class tried to guess whether we were looking at a homicide, a suicide, or a misadventure. Almost no one got the correct answer—it was a suicide. A psych patient out of the hospital on a pass, she had thrown herself under the shrieking blade of a sawmill. Aha! everybody laughed, as I sat paralyzed with horror. I was studying to be a psych nurse but now thought seriously about abandoning my lifelong ambition. I was certain I could never stand it if I lost a patient that way.

Here I am, thirty years later, having spent my career steeped in gore, untimely death, and human suffering. Gruesome crime scene photos have been my stock-in-trade.

But I was stuck with psych nursing. Surprisingly, I had been the only student in my class of thirty, back at the small nursing college, who was at all inspired by the psychiatric specialization. Many of the others though the psych rotation was stupid, a waste of time, not real nursing at all. Others were terrified that they’d be walking into a snake pit, where they’d risk being injured or killed. It’s true that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, all too many state hospitals resembled the institution in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But this was 1970 and we were doing our training in a much more humane setting, the small locked psych ward of a general hospital, under an instructor so revered that the staff called her Dr. Nurse.

For my first day of clinical practice I dressed carefully, I still remember, in a plaid suit and a gold sweater—psych nurses wear street clothes instead of whites, so the patients feel more like clients than incarcerees— eager to make a good impression on the patient assigned to be my very own. He was nowhere to be found, however, so I wound up disappointedly sitting in the dayroom, where a kindly man around my father’s age approached me. We made small talk and he confided that he had entered the hospital because he needed a safe environment in which to deal with some things. I felt so proud—already a patient was feeling comfortable enough to open up to me.

I was determined to continue to draw him out, so I went along when the man suggested that I come to his room, where there was something he wanted to retrieve. He kicked the door shut, and as he fumbled in the closet, I settled onto the bedside chair. You’re not like the others, he said. I like talking to you.

I allowed myself a small private smile of pride.

I like talking to you because you are interested in me and what I have to say, not just in telling me to do something.

Telling you to do something …, I echoed, as we had been taught. Reflecting a patient’s thoughts so he could hear them out loud was supposed to help him develop new insights.

Yeah, always telling me what to do, wanting things … He moved away from the closet, pacing back and forth in front of the door as his agitation built. Always clawing at me. Nothing is ever good enough …

Great, I thought, he’s emotionally engaged. I was oblivious to the fact that I was effectively trapped in the room. I then popped the classic therapeutic question, How does that make you feel?

Feel? I feel like they’re always watching. They’ll never leave me alone. They’re always wanting something, I can feel their eyes –

Whose eyes? I interrupted.

My wife’s, of course! She’s always pushing me, pushing—she can never happy … I don’t want to hurt them, I love them, my son and my little girl …

By now he was crying and shaking, and just then, the door opened. Dr. Nurse said firmly, Candy, I need to see you at the nursing station.

Don’t go, the man begged, clutching desperately at my hands. I tried to reassure him: We can help you here, don’t worry, things will get better for you …, as Dr. Nurse gently tugged me away.

In the hall she asked, Do you know why that man’s in here?

Well, he seemed like a paranoiac, I began, warming to my role as junior diagnostician.

You might say that, Dr. Nurse replied. Paranoid enough to think his family was trying to kill him, so he killed them first. While they were sleeping, he bludgeoned his son and his three-year-old baby girl with a golf club, and then he stabbed his wife to death. He is what’s known as a ‘family annihilator.’

Sadly he was just the first of many family annihilators I would encounter in my years on maximum-security wards and, later on, as a field profiler for the FBI.

The encounter didn’t scare me. More than anything, it fueled my commitment to the work I was convinced was my calling. I resolved that day that to come to understand how such terrifying delusions could grip the mind and what happened in that horrific moment before such savage impulses were unleashed. Barely out of my teens, I was fired with passion, determined to help other sufferers—so many of the homicidally insane patients I came to know were the products of profound physical and mental brutality—before they reached the point of murder. Thirty years later, through the art/science of profiling, I’m still grappling with the same mysteries, though from a different point of view—with an eye to saving potential future victims of violence.

But I wasn’t so naïve as to miss learning some important lessons from my mistake: That was the last time I ever got myself cornered alone in a room with a patient; and I now knew better than to press a psychotic person to get in touch with his feelings. A patient in such a state needs to be watched and reassured that the voices in his head or feelings that are overwhelming him aren’t real, until medication can bring him some relief. Insights fan the flames of terrifying delusions, but I’ve even seen psychotherapists badger patients to express feelings that the lucid parts of their minds are struggling to contain—and for good reason. I used to call that the these hands syndrome—a hubristic belief, flying in the face of patients’ needs and cues, not to mention plain common sense, in one’s own ability to effect healing.

I finished my studies and became a registered nurse (RN) specializing in psychiatry. My patients ran the gamut from the troubled, people who needed a brief stint in the hospital to get over some emotional speed bump in life, to those afflicted with anorexia nervosa, manic and chronic depression, and schizophrenia with full-blown auditory and visual hallucinations. Few of them were homicidal, of course—the majority of the criminally ill on the wards were garden-variety mentally disordered sex offenders. Nor was the strangest patient I ever saw a killer. Rather, she was a tiny, plump, elderly woman with a sweet round face, clear blue eyes, and snow-white hair tied up in a soft bun. In her cotton floral print housedress, she looked like Norman Rockwell’s idea of the perfect granny.

In fact she was a great-grandmother, an octogenarian living with her middle-aged daughter and son-in-law, who one day, all of a sudden, got combative, throwing glasses of water and spitting at anyone who crossed her path. Her shocked family called their family physician, who advised them to take her to the emergency room, thinking that perhaps she had hit her head or was having some kind of bizarre seizure. That was easier said than done. No one could quell her ferocity long enough to get her into the car. So they called the paramedics, and eventually it took three trained men to wrestle the hundred-pound woman into the ambulance. In the ER, fighting like a demon, she had to be clapped into four-way leather restraints to protect the staff.

When exhaustive testing yielded no physical key to her condition, she was admitted to the psych ward, where she began to wreak havoc. Not because of her wild flailing—we were used to that—but because of the roars coming out of her mouth. She was bellowing the most vividly obscene, almost kaleidoscopically inventive vulgarities any of us had heard. When I first met her, she greeted me with a vehement burst: Eat shit, you ugly pussy-eater slut, fuck you, you cocksucker bitch whore—that was just the warm-up—followed by a beatific smile. Then she spat at me, with her daughter standing by, mortified. I was choking, trying not to laugh.

Nothing I studied at St. Joseph’s College of Nursing ever prepared me for this!

Her problem, of course, was not really funny. The poor woman’s verbal assaults went on around the clock, for days. She never even slept. Every few seconds a barrage of obscenities would spew from her mouth, like an eruption of Old Faithful. The profanities might come in sentences or in an alphabetical list, or sometimes just in a torrent like one long, screamed curse. We had to confine the patient to her room so that her howls wouldn’t disturb the others and for her own protection, lest some already agitated patient be provoked enough by her imprecations to attack. It was hard enough for us to withstand her abuse. She was under twenty-four-hour observation, which meant that staff members had to take turns being shut in with her and subjected to her hour-upon-hour litany of vulgarities. We would draw straws to pick each shift’s sacrificial lamb. When we were finally able to get her sedated enough to sleep (a little-by-little process that took a few